Thank you, your story was excellent.
Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#12> She would have died having never seen the sky. It’s too much to bear.
The story has a really tragic implication though...
It strongly hints that millions will die in pain from the knowledge that the post-doc "lost" and that the other rats in the cohort died in vain.
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#13Your story does a great job at highlighting the small but profound every-day experiences of working in a lab with living beings as test subjects. It's hard to put into words the strength of wonder you can acquire for life working as a scientist or animal handler -- you have immense depth of understanding of the microscopic scale biology while simultaneously seeing it at work in real time in the whole animal (or society of animals) on the macro scale. It's the biology equivalent to the "pale blue dot" sentiment.
The only similar deep, profound awe at life I've had outside of the lab was when my son was born. This might be the most common way people achieve this state of being. In all honesty this was one of the best parts of lab work. For me it happened every day; you're reminded of the insane complexity and the high degree of frailty of life. The terribly large power difference between yourself and a small animal in your hand. The deep similarities between humans and other animals, and at the same time, the worlds of difference. For me these experiences in the lab day after day put many other things in life on a lower rung, for better or for worse (like sustaining grad student pay and living conditions perhaps). But I wouldn't trade having that experience for anything.
Your story hints at this beautifully, and I hope others get the chance to feel that feeling.
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#14Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#15> This is done as humanely as possible, of course.
As humanely as possible within the constraints of time, budget, and "I really want to know what happens when I do X to these animals" I guess.
It's amazing what kind of things we can sweep away with a quick "it's for [my assumption of] the greater good".
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#16A beautifully-written and moving story; thanks for posting it. Have you written any other fiction? I couldn't see it (or even this one) in the list of writing on your frontpage. Wholeheartedly approve your reading list, by the way. O Caledonia in particular is an under-recognized gem; I've never seen anyone else capture the awesomeness of squirrels the way she does: > Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeche…
You see awesomeness in a squirrel, I see a pest to eradicate.
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Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#17A beautifully-written and moving story; thanks for posting it. Have you written any other fiction? I couldn't see it (or even this one) in the list of writing on your frontpage. Wholeheartedly approve your reading list, by the way. O Caledonia in particular is an under-recognized gem; I've never seen anyone else capture the awesomeness of squirrels the way she does: > Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeche…
You see awesomeness in a squirrel, I see a pest to eradicate.
It seems perfectly in character that your response would be so sparse while your interlocutor was so evocative.
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#18I kept waiting for Chekhov’s gun (the sphere) to be fired.. but then the story ended. I enjoyed it, to be sure, but I guess I went in expecting it to be more Stross-y.
It has a distinct lack of anti-evangelical rants to be Stross-y.
I'm a big fan of Charles Stross.
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#19> She would have died having never seen the sky. It’s too much to bear.
The story has a really tragic implication though... It strongly hints that millions will die in pain from the knowledge that the post-doc "lost" and that the other rats in the cohort died in vain.
I disagree. Replicating and dying is the nature of animal life. Breaking the cycle would eventually flood the world with immortal life that would have to eventually almost exclusively feed on each other, since everything else has been grazed off.
Re: Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story has a really tragic implication though... It strongly hints that millions will die in pain from the knowledge that the post-doc "lost" and that the other rats in the cohort died in vain.
I disagree. Replicating and dying is the nature of animal life. Breaking the cycle would eventually flood the world with immortal life that would have to eventually almost exclusively feed on each other, since everything else has been grazed off.
OK, I hear you.
So we're talking about hints - is Anna immortal? or just very long-lived?
Assuming the weaker choice still leads to millions of HUMANS dying from the possible cures to the diseases her cohort had.
The postdoc was clearly working on curing a range of inflammatory diseases and working against age related infirmities in HUMANS based on a unified theory:
> this was clearly the work of many years. It described a theory of cellular inflammation and metabolism, “apoptosis” and DNA repair, a theory of aging, that in the author’s own telling would have extraordinary consequences if true.
When the experiment "failed" the postdoc not only stopped her own investigations, but discouraged others:
> The last and longest-running of the experiments, she wrote, had been catastrophic: the subjects had all died. The rest of the paper proceeded from that fact. Becker eviscerated her own theory. In the conclusion she practically apologized. She deemed the whole line of thinking a scientific dead end.